The parents of Alexander Petrov, the suspect in Skripal poisoning, who is referred to as a GRU officer Alexander Mishkin, left their home village in the Arkhangelsk region in haste, their neighbors said.

The parents of Petrov-Mishkin "had to leave" the village of Lomovatka, Dozhd reported. Alexander Lisichkin of the neighboring Loiga settlement said that Mishkin was a military doctor and worked in Chechnya. “I don’t believe I have to explain what being a military doctor means. They don’t become Heroes of Russia for nothing," he said.

Earlier, the former KGB agent Boris Karpichkov said that Petrov was to kill Christopher Steele, the ex-spy who made the shocking Trump Dossier. A retired KGB colonel, Mikhail Lyubimov, said the statement was a "joke." "The history of the Soviet government has had no cases whatsoever when hostile foreigners were killed," the National News Service quoted him as saying.